Petition to stop FM being switched off

On Thu, 25 Jun 2009 23:13:30 +0100 (BST), "Dave Liquorice"
wrote:

On Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:53:23 -0700 (PDT), 2Bdecided wrote:

iPlayer iPod

iPod Car

No good for live, but I still have R4 FM for live. Don't use it -
choice of previous week's R4 much more useful!

Aye I listen to far more radio now than I have done in a long time
and I've found some very interesting programmes that I didn't even
know existed. Podcasts from the BBC, love 'em.

Me too. R4, R7 and PlanetRock for me.

--
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On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:19:50 +0100, Eeyore
wrote:



"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:

Eeyore wrote:
Besides, DAB is inferior. Good FM beats it hands down.

I'm surprised at that statement from you, Graham. DAB at a decent bitrate
knocks FM into touch. Of course if you want to compare 'good' FM to poor
bitrate DAB to make a point, so be it.

DAB sadly AIUI uses an ancient codec that's fixed in stone. The choice of
codec should have been left open to allow for improvements.

Absolutely.

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Roderick Stewart wrote:
In article , Ian
Smith wrote:
I don't agree with you in terms of quality. I have an excellent
sound system and I've never managed to get anything that gets near
hiss-free on FM.

This is very much like the vinyl v CD discussion. Vinyl have me
crackly playback, oven on a good deck and with a new pressing. CD
gave me click and pop free playback - no matter what any HiFi mag
says, the 'quality' of my CD experience is higher.

Hiss, the presence or absence of, is not the only measure of "quality".
The hiss on FM is simply superimposed on the sound, and doesn't alter
what it sounds like. Digital sound with bit-rate reduction is quite a
different situation.

The comparison between FM and DAB is nothing like the comparison
between gramophone recordings and compact discs. The digital bit rate
on CD is about 10 times the best rates we are now using on DAB and is
not subject to any destructive bit-rate reduction.

And that resolves to how much the compression algorithms suit teh
material being played.

Its possible to do intelligible speech at 50 baud..it must be, because
you can read a telex at 50 baud and speak it out in real time

Rod.
:-)

You cant do teh nunaces of a full orchestra like that, though.

Must take at least 300 baud to transmit the score, and have an orchestra
play it, but that loses the nuances altogether ;-)

charles wrote:
In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:

I mean fer chrissake I was getting RUSSIAN instead of radio 2.. on FM.
Leastways it sounded slavic. That was an FM portable..some sort of freak
atmospherics I suppose.

It was short wave broadcasts being picked up in the IF strip. 10.7MHz is on
the edge of the 25 metre band.

You may very well be right.

On Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:46:27 +0100, Ian Smith
wrote:

DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:



In other words, you live in a crap FM reception area.

There is some truth in that.

Reception quality is different to audio quality, and anybody who has
reasonably good reception quality on both DAB and FM will receive
higher qulaity on FM.

Well, most people don't agree with you. Whether they are discerning
or not, I don't know.

I don't agree with you in terms of quality. I have an excellent
sound system and I've never managed to get anything that gets near
hiss-free on FM.

I can manage a hiss-free FM reception on my old Leak Troughline 3 ( a
valve tuner ).
The difference between an FM broadcast via good tuner and a digital
one is chalk and cheese - and if your kit was up to any kind of
scratch you'd understand why the spatial separation was important.

You know that popular video technique of zooming in on the central
object ( they do it to death on Top Gear ), and the way it takes you
from 'outside' the shot to right inside it? That's the difference, but
in audio terms.

Regards,


--
Steve ( out in the sticks )
Email: Take time to reply: timefrom_usenet{at}gmx.net

galaxyguy wrote:
On 26 June, 09:52, tony sayer wrote:
In article , Steve Terry
scribeth thus





"Chas Gill" wrote in message
...
"Bill Wright" wrote in message
...
"Andy Dee" wrote in message
...
DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
There's a 10 Downing St petition to stop FM/AM being switched off:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/AM-FM-Radio/
Please sign. Thanks.
mad
So why do we need the American spelling "Analog" in this petition?
PLEASE why can't we remain British and use ENGLISH in this country....
/mad
A
I'm afraid the Times spells it 'analog'.
Bill
Personally I don't give a f**k how it's spelled (spelt?) - the whole point
is that I have a serious investment in FM radio in my life and I don't
want to have to scrap it at someone else's whim.
I'm sure milions of people are in your boat
But i look around and now almost none of my radio listening is using
FM or AM.
In the kitchen i listen to my DAB portable, in the living room via DVB-T
freeview box, or on Astra 2, mostly so i can get BBC Radio 7
and on my laptop i mostly listen to US Talk radio on internet radio.
If i could get BBC Radio 7 on Band 2 FM
I would have a use for FM
Steve Terry
From most all of the comments I've heard from local shops and the few
people I've spoken to .. the main driver for DAB receiver purchase is to
receive Radio 5 Live better, where the medium wave reception is not that
good!..

Round here its fine .. well as far as MW goes, in the car...
--
Tony Sayer

The importance of maintaining Radio 4 in stereo cannot be
underestimated. If one listens on a decent stereo FM tuner to the
drama, be it the Afternoon Play or weekend ones it is incredible to
hear how the two channels are used so expertly for voice and
background sound. It makes the difference between watching b+w TV and
watching colour. DAB radio sets are principally mono (to match most of
the output). All tonality and depth has been scrubbed away from voices
and music to leave them sounding 'surgically clean' when you have a
signal. Even 30 miles from London, I find that in some rooms and on
some days if I happen to be listening to DAB I have to change to FM
because of the gurgling 'hot water bottle' noise that replaces what is
being broadcast. Then again, the BBC itself have had a number of
recent times when they have been broadcasting DAB and every 4th or 5th
word has been lost due to some error before the signal reaches the
transmitter. FM must not be left as a third rate junk yard. We need it
for our main national broadcasters. Incidentally, concerning the
petition it is a major error that it was composed by someone unable to
spell analogue correctly. I would willingly sign any FM/AM petition
written in English. Presenting American spelling is something of a
disaster and shoots us in the foot.
Please rectify it at once.

Your argument is not an argument for FM, it is an argument to maintain
quality.

Now let me reason a little:

The only place where you need quality is in a fixed environment. A car
is a noisy place, and so it outside so portable radios needn't be high
quality. BUT if you can get a high quality ONLINE radio signal via
broadband..is that enough?

The arguments that 'DAB is CRAP' relate not to it being digital per se,
but to the intense amount of compression, both analogue and digital,
applied to it to squeeze a lot of channels out of a small spectrum.

Ergo, if we go up the spectrum to the Ghz bands, there is room for lots
of audio channels of high quality, as long as we realise that we need
transmitters everywhere. A la phone cells etc.

There is also perssure to move to entirely digital transmissions simply
on account of teh fact that the Internet is also a valid transmission
medium for many..my Ex-apt sister LOVES hearing the BBC in greece..world
service reaches further on the 'net than anything else..LW/MW stops at
Stuttgart as it were..and SW stuff is vile.

So by all means pressure for quality: thats is a desirable. HOW it is
done is actually not the issue. WE know thet digital CAN be as good or
better than FM..its a question of making sure that it is.

I am not sure what the bitrate of a raw CD is..I guess 44 x 2 x 14 kpbs?
is it 14 bits?

So 1.2Mbps.

With a decent S/N on a radio, that ought to fit EASILY into a few Khz of
bandwith..less than 100 anyway.

Paul Martin wrote:
In article ,
tony sayer wrote:

I don't reckon its ideal but according to an Orange engineer I was
talking to on a transmitter site, he said that you could regard it as a
40 megabit capacity wi-fi point and that was just that cell of which
there're rolling out more and more as time goes by!...

Strange that I only ever get a patchy 64kbps equivalent out of my
Orange connection on 3G.

Then likely as not, its because its heavily trafficked. Broadcast, by
definition, is exactly trafficked to the number of stations being
transmitted.

In article ,
DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
Small Internet radio stations aren't in it for the profit, and they're
in it to play the music they like.

How do they pay for that music?

--
*You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

In article ,
JN [email protected] wrote:
But then people do seem
willing to part with around £50/month for satellite services so I could
well be wrong, again.

Mainly for the footie, though.

--
*Why is the word abbreviation so long?

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Paul Martin wrote:
In article ,
Kráftéé wrote:
jasee wrote:
| Alan wrote:
|| In message , DAB sounds worse
|| than FM wrote
||| There's a 10 Downing St petition to stop FM/AM being switched off:
|||
||| http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/AM-FM-Radio/
||
||
|| Why would anyone want to sign something that may prevent us getting
|| hundreds of radio stations on DAB?
|
| Why would it do that?
| How many more rubbish radio stations (at lower quality than FM) do
| you want anyway?

But with a greater bandwidth they wouldn't have to compress the audio
so much & so you could have better quality sound, the way it should
be!

What greater bandwidth? The trend has been to crank down the bitrates,
from 128kbps, to 112kbps, and even 96kbps. Of the commercial stations,
only Classic FM has used a half-decent bitrate (160kbps).

That is probably because of spectrum limitations.

As I said in an earlier post, I calculate the raw CD quality bitrate as
about 1.2Mbps.

Now using the whole of a 200KHZ FM channel for that at indifferent
quality, is wasteful.

I think that my 'online' stations are around 250Kbps. Quality is pretty
good.

the real solution is to go higher in frequency. Much more space, and not
already allocated. AND it doesn't hop skip and jump all over the world.